In 2024, Kazakhstan intensified its efforts to deal with cash laundering by shutting down 36 unlawful cryptocurrency exchanges, a pointy decline of 96% in comparison with the earlier 12 months.
On January 6, the Monetary Monitoring Company (FMA) of Kazakhstan revealed that these exchanges had been working with out correct authorization.
The company defined that these unlicensed platforms facilitated illicit actions by permitting untraceable fiat-to-crypto and crypto-to-fiat transactions, typically utilized by criminals equivalent to cyber fraudsters and drug sellers. The FMA said that the overall turnover of the 36 exchanges was round 60 billion Kazakhstani tenge ($112.8 million), with authorities seizing roughly 2.5 billion tenge ($4.8 million) in belongings.
This crackdown is a part of Kazakhstan’s ongoing marketing campaign towards unlicensed crypto providers. In 2023, the FMA took motion towards 980 unlawful exchanges and initiated 9 investigations associated to cash laundering. Regardless of these efforts, a number of globally licensed exchanges, together with Binance, Bybit, and Upbit, proceed to function legally throughout the nation.
Kazakhstan has been actively working with different authorities businesses, such because the Nationwide Safety Committee and the Ministry of Tradition and Data, to get rid of unlicensed exchanges. Up to now, over 3,500 unlawful platforms have been taken offline. Amongst these, two had been discovered to be working as pyramid schemes, prompting authorized actions and the return of $545,000 to defrauded buyers.
